I suppose this piece is in some way a continuation of my essay on definition. Not really, but actually. I deal again here with a form of categorisation. I explore how ‘we’ designates ourselves and all of the duplicities a we embodies. Yet somewhat oddly there is a short hand around the nuances and complexities…
Read MoreThe New Conspiracy Visibility
Disclaimer First off, I want it to be clear that I am not an advocate of conspiratorial worldviews. When I say they are ‘real’ I mean to suggest that they are an object-event (a phenomenon which we can point at) which is happening. The subscribers of these worldviews, by subscribing to them, give them this…
Read MoreAffecting a Speculative Definition of Humanity (Part II)
Perceptive-objects Gradations of intensity differentiate one object from another. To illustrate this Garcia talks about scales of comprehension. We can better comprehend other objects because of certain functions of perception unique to us. This is a different intensity of comprehension from the room’s comprehension of us, which is a matter of containment. The room’s comprehension…
Read MoreAffecting a Speculative Definition of Humanity (part 1)
Definition-objects In this two part essay I want to interrogate how objects contribute to defining humanity? According to Tristan Garcia in his comprehensive and unique Form and Object (2014), ‘Present day humanity’s relations to animals and to artefacts makes us hopelessly attempt to prove what humanity is as an object’ (238). The ‘hopeless’ is indicative…
Read MoreClimate Emergency+Corona Emergency=Chronic Emergencies
In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020), Swedish academic Andreas Malm explains how the primary catalyst of the pandemic is the deforestation of wildlife habitats. Deforestation has squeezed the once yawning gap between wildlife habitats and human civilisation, paving the way for pathogens to embed themselves in human societies. Malm’s…
Read MoreCOVID AND WORLD RISK SOCIETY
WHAT IS WORLD RISK SOCIETY? World Risk Society (1999) is a book of sociological theory written by German academic Ulrich Beck. Written at the dawn of the new Millennium, it has been an influential text, being regularly referred to by theorists working in environmentalism and ecological philosophy (Morton). I even suspect his language is used…
Read MoreGetting a little help “phasing” in & out of things with ‘Everything’
In my previous post I explained a little about Tim Morton’s term phasing, which is a sort of abstract toggle function we can utilize whilst going-about-our-business, to create our own context explosions. Understanding context explosions enables us to think more about the potential trajectory of something, anything, everything. Only a few days after my previous…
Read MorePhasing in & out of Subscendent Wholes
My dissertation has been handed in & now I am flooded with mild anxiety. It hadn’t really occurred to me that most people write about authors long deceased. John Wedgewood Clarke is very much alive and active; as are the sources I cite, in large part. Only Heidegger & Derek Parfit are the exceptions. This…
Read MoreThe “Spectrality” of Phytoplankton in John Wedgewood Clarke’s Landfill
In Landfill, poet John Wedgewood Clarke takes the reader on walks along the trekking paths of some of England’s most outstanding areas of natural beauty. One such area is the Greensand Way connecting Surrey and Kent. Clarke, choice picks this location owing to a property of its geological composition: it is made of chalk. Landscapes…
Read MoreAn Introduction to Levi R. Bryant’s Virtual Proper Being
In The Democracy of Objects Levi R. Bryant explains that …the substantiality of objects is not a bare substratum, but rather an absolutely individual system or organization of powers. Powers are the capacities of an object or what it can do. The powers of an object are never something that is directly manifested in the…
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